Day-After Day

12May08

I don’t know why I didn’t post yesterday. Something about it being Mother’s Day just paralyzed me. I mean, talk about pressure, right? All the blogs I read were all waxing eloquent about mothers and motherhood and I just stood there staring into their eloquent, eloquent goodness going, uh, wuh?

Except honestly? I sort of don’t see myself in this long line of mothers. I see myself in a line that starts here with me and ends with my mom, or I guess that should be vice versa. I didn’t know her mom — she died months before I was born — and I wouldn’t say there’s this whole big feeling of tradition or of wisdom being passed down through the generations. I’ve written before about how much I learned from my own mom, and I’ve written a little bit about my paternal grandmother, but really I just sort of think of me and my mom and my sister as this little unit. A little wooden puzzle box.

As for motherhood, it still feels pretty new. Aside from assorted moments of clarity, it still feels like something I can’t understand well enough to explain to you in a nice little post. It feels hard in a way that’s not a lot of work yet. Hard in a way that’s so easy. Hard in a way that requires energy but not effort. I feel like that will change and in a strange way I almost feel eager, almost feel nostalgic (even though that makes no sense) for a kind of motherhood that requires more labor in the day-to-day and not the first-day-of-your-life kind of way. The kind of motherhood that kneads and scrubs, maybe?

There’s also this whole Ph.D. thing. For me, being a mom feels so tied up with the being in school thing, the dissertation writing thing, and something about all that makes me feel even more isolated as a mama. Not isolated from people but maybe isolated from people’s experiences. The work I do isn’t the work of washing windows and hanging laundry on a line. But of course neither is the work of most of the moms I know.

I don’t know. Now that I’m writing I feel less and less sure what I mean to write. And there it is again: the paralysis. The not knowing how to explain what it means to me to be a mom, to have a mom.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll go back to saying, “uh, wuh?” and then “yeah, what she said.”

So True…

"By telling personal stories we build our social identity; by exchanging or withholding our stories we manage our social relationships; and through story exchanges we construe, and even change, society." - Joann Bromberg